I must confess; I didn’t know. I didn’t know Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (NUMA) had arrived in the mainstream computer world. Sure I knew about NUMA; Expensive hardware systems, like Mainframes and large Unix system have been using it for years.
But in fact, since the arrival of the AMD Opteron, Intel’s Itanium and especially now with the new Nehalem processor (Core i7), even simple dual processor systems have NUMA onboard:
As an independent DDR3 IMC is integrated on each socket for the interface to access memory, the IMC platform remarkably increases the bandwidth (the peak bandwidth of DDR3-1333 can be up to 32GB/s, 4-6 times wider than previous platforms), reduces the memory latency, improves performance, and offers each CPU a fast channel to local memory. Unlike previous generation platform, IMC platform uses NUMA architecture for memory access, thus greatly advancing the performance of NUMA-aware applications. DDR3 IMC supports up to 96GB DDR3 memory capacity per CPU interface, and even up to 144GB in the future, which provides a strong memory support for high-end enterprise computing.
(Quote from Learning Experience of NUMA and Intel’s Next Generation Xeon Processor I)
Fortunately, MS SQL Server 2008 (as did 2005) fully supports NUMA.